Jack Windle tied the leather straps of his boots and hoisted a rifle over his shoulder. It was time for the winter kill and Jack was on his way to help his neighbours butcher three of their pigs and salt the meat to preserve it for winter storage. Eventually freezers would be invented, but in 1899 the salting method was most effective.
Jack’s seven young children lined the kitchen window to watch the first snow fall upon their Ontario farm, while Jack bundled up against the icy wind and began his trek. The farm was shared between his brother’s family and his own, both having inherited the two hundred acres from their father. Jack’s family was comfortable here. They enjoyed moderate success and had acquired good quality livestock and a few lovely pieces of furniture, which his wife Bridget took particular pride in.
Jack looked across the open land and could see his neighbour’s house just past the fence that divided their properties. Slowing to maneuver under the chain-link, Jack suddenly lost his footing and slid forward, jarring the rifle. A bullet entered slightly above his hip and he died instantly.
The Windles’ life had been content and predictable together on the farm, following the lead of their parents who had lived in very much the same manner, as had their parents before them. Until the accident it had been easy to visualize how life would be for them, free from change and confusing choices. But the accident shattered their traditional plans.
Fortunately Jack’s wife was a woman of great inner strength. Bridget was able to tend her seven children and the family’s share of the farmwork with self-assuredness, striving to retain the harmony in her home. It was soon clear, however, that her husband’s brother loathed the extra responsibility he felt he had and she came to despise the way he began to treat her children. She began to visualize a different life for her family.
At this point, Bridget’s two sibings and their families had been homesteading in Alberta for some time and had often encouraged her to venture west. Though she had many misgivings, the family embarked on a precarious journey to a rough and relatively untouched land. In the fall of 1900, Bridget and her seven children travelled on the Canadian Pacific Railway across Canada to become pioneers of Alberta…
This is an excerpt from a story I wrote and submitted to the Calgary Herald short story contest in 1987. It goes on for pages and pages, lol. Bridget was my great-grandmother, and her second youngest child was my Gramma. When they crossed the country in 1900, Gramma would have been five years old and her younger sister, Great Aunt Peggy, was three. They shared a lifelong closeness and both lived to be nearly 100 years old!
I could go on and on talking about my amazing Gramma, who was the Gold Medalist at the Senior’s Card Olympics one year (I know, who knew there was such a thing.) She once had a dinner party for 13 people, but only had 12 matching dishes in her set. She figured she would just eat off the plain one herself, but tripped on her way to the table with the stack of dishes and they all broke – except the plain one! When we all started having our own babies, she would set them precariously at the very edge of her knee to rock and bounce them. We held our breath baby after baby, but no one dared say anything and all went well in the end. She used to voice enormous disdain when technology came in and required you to scroll down to select the year you were born, because not a single one of them went back as far as the year 1885. It wasn’t the technology she disliked, though – in fact, in the early 1980s she declared that if she was a younger person she thought she would invest in that new company called Apple. Soon after that we took the first videos of her and when we played them back, she thought the entire country was watching her on TV.
She was amazing. Her name was Dora. Her mom, Bridget, died the day she brought my own mom home from the hospital. So my mom never had a grandma. But we all did and we adored her. Grandparents Day is on September 8th. If you have grandparents, hug them hard. If you don’t, hug someone else’s. And if you want to read Gramma’s whole story, see Golden Nuggets at this link!